September 2012

September 14, 2012

When an old technology is eclipsed by a shiny new rival, the old technology, after some years, will often emerge again, in a romantic crescent of its former self. And how sweet its second light can be.

When electric light made gaslight and candles obsolete, it did so profoundly. But after some decades, gaslight came back—in streetlights twinkling along certain brick streets, and in carriage lights in front of occasional homes. And what home doesn’t have candles? How better to see, when we allow our hearts to guide us, than by candlelight?

Up in the attic

Before they can reemerge, however, old technologies must first enter what I call their Attic Period. That’s when we hastily put them out of sight as we rush headlong into the infatuation stage with our new lovers. After some time, when infatuation evolves into habituation, a seeming accident happens. Somebody goes up to the attic, sees something intriguing in a dim corner, blows off the dust, and smiles.

Often it’s younger people who make the rediscovery. Since they grew up with, and therefore take for granted, the technologies that amazed their elders, their fresh eyes see the old as new. When they add their youthful touch, the old is transformed. Old becomes old school, or vintage or retro, or classic or heirloom or heritage. When these young people proudly show off their new discovery, it can bring a winsome smile to an elder’s face.

Today, thanks to laptops and digital tablets, paper notebooks are already in their Attic Period. I would be more worried if I didn’t understand it was inevitable, and if I didn’t realize that rediscovery is also inevitable.

What’s more, I’m smiling as I write this because I know what the technology cycles can’t: we at Levenger are up in the attic right now with those notebooks—and we’re already designing a stunning renaissance.

Low price, with expectations to match

To see how far paper notebooks might go, it’s helpful to know how they began.

Cheap office supply pad showing this old graphic design

In 20th-century paper notebooks, the first page was like the last page, and like all the pages in between. These notebooks were bricks of identical paper sheets. No one thought much about it. Not all that much was expected of paper notebooks, everyone had to use them, and the main focus was on making them cheap. Cheap has merit: inexpensive notebooks and other school supplies helped democratize education in America. But few students would have credited their notebooks as sources of inspiration. Most graphic designs used in 20th-century notebooks and notepads actually came from the 19th century. Typical designs had anemic blue horizontal rules and a vertical red line down the left side to make a narrow margin. This pattern, an improvement over blank sheets, was invented by an American judge in 1888, and hasn’t changed much since. Production was, and still is, optimized for high volume and low price.

There were some alternatives, such as graph paper, ledger paper, scientific formats, and so on, but these were few. No one gave much thought to how new graphic designs in notebooks might evoke better thinking and results in commonly performed tasks.

But better page formats did gradually emerge.

One simple but shining example took place in the mid-20th century. Cornell professor Walter Pauk advised his students to prepare for taking class notes by drawing a vertical line on the left side of their notebook sheet to give a margin wide enough to write their own questions. Covering up your notes as you query yourself with your own questions became known as the Cornell System of note-taking.

But why couldn’t paper be printed with this annotation margin to begin with? It could, of course, and was—first by Levenger, so far as I know, and then by others.

Creative comebacks

Decades after Walter Pauk retired, an enterprising Cornell graduate named Scott Belsky founded a company dedicated to helping creative people execute their ideas. His company, Behance, offers mostly online tools, but Scott and his partner, Metias Correa, also designed well-formatted, colorful paper that helped people focus their attention and follow through more thoroughly with Action Steps. Simple and compelling, the Behance pages gently guide and reward 21st-century users in delightful new ways.

Behance also improved the idea of a grid of faint, gray dots, which combines the benefits of graph paper with the freedom of blank paper. The elegant execution of this dot grid provides a surprisingly flexible tool for today’s note-takers.

A completely different way to make paper more productive is by making the paper itself irresistibly luscious to write on. A venerable French company named Clairefontaine has been doing this for years. Combine this fine paper and its distinctive purple ink with the Levenger annotation margin design, and you have silky sheets begging for the liquid ink of a fountain pen (another attic find that young people continue to dust off).

There are shaded papers, which for some reason are especially pleasing to write on, and To-Do sheets, and ingenious page formats that help facilitate the discovery of novel solutions.

Under the radar

The big breakthrough in paper notebooks is not any one particular type of page, but rather, the idea that notebooks could, and should, contain different types of sheets from which to choose. This profound change requires both the flexibility of disc-bound notebooks, which allow effortless removal and reinsertion of pages, and a renaissance in paper design.

How ironic: just at the point that, superficially at least, paper notebooks are being made obsolete by digital devices, at Levenger they are experiencing a creative explosion of their own. Perhaps the attic door is already cracking open.

As a historical parallel, we can look to the advent of jet aviation. In the early 1950s, jet engines spawned the Jet Age and predictions that turbo jets would power all our flying, just as nuclear power would provide all our energy needs. Yet 70 years later, prop planes are still flying. They have proved themselves more nimble at low speeds, able to use plentiful, inexpensive airstrips, and as float planes on remote mountain lakes. They are more practical and pleasing for the world of flying that hums under the canopy of high-altitude jets.

An inheritance ready to enjoy now

Digital tablets and smartphones open whole new avenues of human creativity. They can’t be beat for being social, for sharing photos and videos, for being connected to the massive intelligence of the hive. But they enable only part of our human abilities.

Paper notebooks are better for communicating with oneself, superior at enabling quiet reflection and tranquil concentration.

The Attic Period can be seen as a forlorn time, when a former champion is relegated to the shadows. But it can also be a blessing.

When the world no longer depends on a particular technology for everything, when the pressure is off, that technology can recharge and collect itself in the loving hands of its caretakers. What are its inherent strengths? What might it become? What changes elsewhere in the world can be hybridized with it in order to create something at once old and new?

This is what’s happening to paper now—and not just paper notebooks, but paper pads, paper cards, new paper formats, and, of course, paper books. (As Harvard professor Leah Price noted in her essay for The New York Times Book Review, “Every generation rewrites the [paper] book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”

Paper is among the most important technologies ever invented. Together with the invention of writing and printing, paper—in the form of notebooks, letters, articles, blueprints and books—has enabled all further technological development and what we know as civilization.

I smile at the thought of young people traipsing up the attic stairs—a bit weary of social networks and mandatory sharing, knowing there is more they can do with their hands than point and click. They will pick up a thoughtfully designed paper notebook and know it’s meant to be private, and want to put their own stamp on it.

The door to the attic is already opening, and what the young people will find is not a dark place but a well-lit loft, full of new kinds of notebooks ready to be individualized—ready for the next steps in imagination that they will provide.

As is true of our planet, we don’t own the heritage technologies we are given; we borrow them from our children.

And now, dear reader, it’s your turn to add your reflections—for it’s time to be social. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

September 05, 2012

On 24 August, in the 12th year of this 21st century, an unusual monument was unveiled in front of the Ashtabula County Courthouse in Geneva, Ohio. That the monument was dedicated to a citizen who passed away 148 years ago was unusual enough, but what is hard to believe, in this age of digital texting and tapping, was that this man’s claim to fame was handwriting.

Steve Leveen and Michael Sull at the Platt Rogers Spencer dedication

The monument is in the shape of an obelisk and is crowned by a bronze quill. Adorning one side is an image of Platt Rogers Spencer, America’s founding father of handwriting.

Spencer is credited with inventing and disseminating Americans’ own form of handwriting. (Before Spencer, Americans made do with daunting manuals from England and a British script.) Spencerian Script, as it is known among the aficionados who carry on his work today, was the basis for all subsequent forms of handwriting and handwriting instruction taught in the United States, including the Palmer and Zaner-Bloser methods. The latter is still taught in some schools today. Yet Spencer, and his legacy, was all but forgotten a generation ago.

Some thirty years ago, a singular man named Michael Sull became interested in researching the history of handwriting during his quest to become a certified Master Penman, a trade and certification nearly as extinct as the passenger pigeon. Michael wrote the definitive history of Spencer and began, twenty-five years ago, a project called The Spencerian Saga, which, every summer on the shores of Lake Erie, convenes teachers and students intent on passing on the techniques of their master. Through Michael’s untiring efforts and the enthusiastic cooperation of the citizens of Geneva—many of them graduates of the Platt R. Spencer High School—this monument was dedicated on a windy, punishingly hot summer afternoon amidst the roar of passing traffic and periodic blasts of passing train horns.

Michael Sull before Spencer gravesite

Along with Michael, representatives of the Zaner-Bloser Company and the official calligrapher of the White House (no, I didn’t know we had one either), a few people were asked to speak. I was one. In the spirit of authenticity, I wrote my speech by hand—first as ideas on notebook paper, then winnowed down to speaking points on index cards.

First draft of Spencer speech

Below is that speech, or what I meant to say. In the interest of time and temperature, I omitted the story of my grandfather. A few of the other sentences were obliterated by the roars of tractor-trailers and motorcycles.

Second draft of Spencer speech

....

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me from hot Florida to come enjoy your summer in Geneva, Ohio. I feel right at home.

As I traveled to attend this event, I couldn’t help wonder what Spencer would think were he among us today. Surely he would be pleased by the accolades, the monument, especially that it is placed in front of the old library that he helped found, and that is now your courthouse. He would, I’m sure, be pleased by the outpouring of enthusiasm for handwriting.

But...what would he think of the iPad?

After the handshakes and embraces, one of us would have to sit down with the great man and an iPad, and show him what’s up.

Anyone want to volunteer for that job?

Spencer Program, Name Tag, and Sample

I suggest you move inside so as not to be distracted by the automobiles and occasional jets flying overhead. Remember, he did pass away in 1864.

On the iPad, you might show him the voice-recognition feature and how he can watch his speech become words on the screen, and then, with a few touches of the glass, how those words can change font and size and color, and, finally, be sent, without a wire, to a printer.

Yet the great man was no stranger to disruptive technological change. Living as he did from 1800 to 1864, Spencer saw the advent and explosive growth of the railroad, and how it utterly transformed the country. Alongside the railroad, literally, he saw the telegraph, which miraculously transformed the letters of the alphabet to dots and dashes sent over unimaginable distances at unimaginable speeds.

In his own field of handwriting, Spencer witnessed the advent of metal dip pens. After two thousand years of writing with bird feathers, his generation saw the arrival of machine-made metal facsimiles of quills that were made with such precision that their delicate tips flexed and spread in a most uniform fashion. These steel nibs were made possible by the same advances in machine technology that made the precise, interchangeable parts needed for the mass production of guns, which were having such devastating effect in the final years of Spencer’s life, coinciding, as they did, with the Civil War.

My guess, being the visionary he was, is that Spencer would adapt fairly quickly to the iPad.

What I think Spencer would have trouble with, however, is...my handwriting.

Yes, I’ve a confession to make—a confession all the more awkward in front of this audience and on this, of all days:

I only print.

Yet I know I am not alone. I frequently hear this admission from our customers, even customers who love pens and paper. They admit it in hushed, apologetic tones.

And that’s not all. Despite their regression to printing, they often pronounce their handwriting unreadable, even to themselves. Usually they compare their handwriting unfavorably with that of their parents, and even more unfavorably with their grandparents’.

This is true in my case in the extreme, for my grandfather was a penmanship instructor.

George W. Knock was born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1898. Tragically, he contracted rheumatic fever as a child, which weakened his heart. This prevented him from serving in the military in World War I, and led eventually to a shortened life. But he was an energetic and enterprising young man.

George W. Knock, Class of 1918 Frederick High School

I have in my home office the framed photograph of his high school graduating class from Frederick High School in 1918. It was an all-male school and as they posed in their uniforms, his face stands out with a watch-out-world-here-I-come expression.

George was interested in new technology and so learned photography and set himself up with a photo studio in New York City. Unfortunately, it failed. He then tried a more established field and enrolled in the Zaner-Bloser school of handwriting in Columbus, Ohio, and set out to become an instructor.

George W. Knock's signature inside his Zanerian Manual

Judging from his work that survives, and from the gold Zaner-Bloser lapel pin I’ve inherited, George excelled at his new field. But I’ve also inherited his gold lapel pins from The Underwood and Remington Typewriter companies, so George learned that technology, too, and went on to a career of teaching both penmanship and office machines in high school in Syracuse, New York.

Like Spencer, my grandfather also saw disruptive technological change in general, and in handwriting in particular. Not only did the typewriter inexorably tap away at the foundation of handwriting’s preeminence, but another technology was responsible for even more undermining. That technology, which went from zero penetration at George’s birth in 1898 to over 75 percent of American homes and virtually all American businesses by the year George died in 1958, was the telephone.

My only memory of my grandfather was straddling his knee, and his only writing addressed to me was his inscription in my copy of Now We Are Six, which he gave to me early, probably knowing he would be unlikely to see my sixth birthday. He died the year I turned four.

I think Spencer would have smiled at my grandfather’s hand, but the great old man would be dismayed at the degraded state of handwriting in America, especially among the young who today are hardly taught at all with pens and paper, while their parents hand iPads over the railings of cribs.

Spencer knew how handwriting naturally promoted reading and learning and provided necessary mind-body awareness and control to children that would pay all dividends for the rest of their lives.

Yet since we’re imagining Spencer being here with us today, let’s go ahead and imagine him hanging out for a few years. For if he did, I’m seeing a smile gradually form and then broaden. I’m seeing all of our smiles broadening, too. For in some years not too distant, we will witness—almost inevitably—a Renaissance in Handwriting.

The truth is: obsolescence is overrated. And, borrowing from Mark Twain, the death of handwriting is exaggerated.

For analogies, all we need to do is look at bicycles and candles.

The fastest form of human transportation in the early 1900s

Bicycles, after a brief period around 1900 of being the fastest form of human transportation, were made obsolete by the automobile. But nobody told the bicycle designers, engineers and marketers who have created a renaissance in two-wheeled transportation. A veritable explosion in specialization, design and technology is delighting billions of people around the planet today.

And candles, which were made obsolete by electric lights more than a century ago, are today everywhere. None of us depend on candles to light our homes, but all of us have candles in our home. Why? Because we understand that we see not only with our eyes but with our hearts, and candles are one of the things that make a house a home.

Older technologies must spend their time in the attic before they are rediscovered. This is happening now with wholesome, heritage foods, and, through the Slow Foods movement, helping us understand that in so much of life, real living isn’t about speed but about savoring.

Mark my words: handwriting will come looping back.

It will be young people who bring it back. Digital Natives is what we call them—these young people who grew up with smartphones and iPads. Sooner or later they will discover that their hands can do things beyond thumb a text message and tap on glass.

Michael Sull's Spencerian script

Thanks to your efforts—the living trustees of our precious human inheritance of handwriting, an inheritance symbolized in this monument to Spencer—young people will be able to rediscover what is theirs. And they will conclude that it is good.

They will assure that beautiful handwriting—and all its many blessings—shall long endure.

And now to you, dear reader: if you could improve or enhance your handwriting—despite texting and tablets and voice-recognition—would you? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).